If we assume that any reasonable proportion of the accusations made against the packing houses were true of some one or other establishment, it still remains that a considerable proportion of the American business community is otherwise engaged than in the canning of meats. There is a story well known in America of a countryman who entered a train with a packet of eggs, none too fresh, in his coat-tail pocket. He sat down upon them; but deemed it best to continue sitting rather than give the contents a chance to run down his person. Meanwhile the smell permeated through the car and at last the passenger sitting immediately behind the countryman saw whence the unpleasantness arose. Whereupon he fell to abusing the other. "Thunder!" exclaimed the countryman. "What have you got to complain of? You've only got the smell. _I'm sitting in it!_" This is much how Americans feel in regard to foreign criticisms of the packing house scandals. Whatever wrong-doing there may have been in individual establishments in this one industry in Chicago, is no more to be taken as typical of the commercial ethics of the American people than the discovery of a fraudulent trader or group of traders in one particular line in Manchester or Glasgow would imply that the British trading public was corrupt. The mere ruthlessness with which, in this case, the wrong-doers were exposed ought in itself to be a sufficient evidence to outsiders that the American public is no more willingly tolerant of dishonesty than any other people. Judged, indeed, by that criterion, surely no other country can detest wrong-doing so whole-heartedly. * * * * * And I wish here to protest against the habit which the worst section of the English newspapers has adopted during the last year or so of holding "American methods" in business up to contempt. It is true that it is not done with any idea of directing hostility against the United States; and those who use the catchword so freely would undoubtedly much prefer to speak of "German methods" or even "French" or "Russian methods," if they could. All that is meant is that the methods are un-English and alien; but whether the intention is to lessen the public good-will towards the United States or not, that must inevitably be the effect. Even if it were not, the American public is abundantly justified in resenting it.